Virtually Home

Grace decided to come visit me on her spring break. And so she arrived, after having missed her international connection in Atlanta due to weather and about five hours late, for a pretty calm evening. We walked around the city a little. We ate delicious crêpes (galettes, really) at a place very near my house. We drank cider. And then we slept until she no longer felt tired. Her resiliency to jetlag, on a first time abroad, was to be commended. That afternoon, we had a lunch of thoroughly French cheeses (some of which were growing Penicillium) and bread, and Vianney met us, complete with rollerblades, at my place. He brought a milk bottle full of canelé dough, which was delicious and which inspired us to get some canelés while we were in Bordeaux. We climbed the 231 stairs of the Tour de Pey-Berland, which is associated with the cathedral right next to my apartment. The view was spectacular, though there was some considerable haze obscuring the horizon line. We walked to Place des Q...

It's funny what growing up in a place will do to you. I never really thought about it until I moved far, far away, where attitudes and languages and body language are different, and started to see my country in a different way. Part of that difference is just starting to see it as "mine" for the first time. I've been making a lot of new friends. Some of them are French, but a lot of them are anglophone. Some of them are Canadian, and some are Australian, and some are English and Welsh. They're all part of the commonwealth, but the idea of connectedness seems to be one-sided -- that is, the British see Australia and Canada as very loosely connected to them if at all, and the Canadians and Australians I've met seem to feel a lot more part of Britain than the British think they are. These countries all have established national health care, and almost the first thing that happens on meeting someone from a country such as this, where everyone speaks at least o...

"Disaster" is about the only word that can describe the beginning of my trip. About midnight before my train was going to leave from Bordeaux, I got news from my mom that the Eurostar might not be running the next day. Confirmation came around 2:30, when I began scrambling to book a last minute plane ticket from Bordeaux to London Gatwick, where I figured I'd catch my previously-scheduled train from Waterloo to Poole. Little did I know that Gatwick had been closed the two previous days, or that British Airways was planning a 12 day holiday strike. Luckily for me, the plane did make it to Gatwick, though it was delayed an hour and a half. Customs in London turned out to be a hassle. I didn't think to write down Tom's address before leaving, since he was going to pick me up at the airport. This fact did not make the customs agents feel comfortable about my being in the country. They seemed to think I would just decide to disappear somewhere in England and just...